News article
Flix complete work for Tim Burton!!
Added on 16 Nov 2009 at 10:27
Our good friends over at Mackinnon and Saunders (M&S) got in touch with the team at Flix CGI to work in collaboration with them on a project for Tim Burton. The famous Hollywood director was asked by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to create a 30 second promo for his upcoming retrospective that would be shown at both the museum itself as well as local NYTV stations.
Tim Burton approached M&S with his concept for the promo - a quirky little robot character that would inflate four Burton-style balloons spelling out the MoMa logo. Although he was eager for the entire promo to be stop motion animation, the extremely tight deadline of 3 weeks from concept to delivery meant that this was not feasible and so M&S came to Flix to create a test shot of the balloons in CG.
M&S provided us with fantastic painted plastercine sculpts of the balloons, which we then reproduced in CG as closely as possible. Tim Burton's original concept art was then textured onto the balloons before adding some imperfections such as fingerprint detail that would all help in recreating the hand-made feel of stop motion. With the models now signed off the team spent the next two days honing the animation until it portrayed the sense that it was stop motion animation. These tests were then sent over to Burton who was deep into post production on his present feature, Alice in Wonderland. "There was a huge sigh of relief when Tim gave the thumbs up, in all honesty I don't know how we'd have got this done in time without the Flix team's work," said Ian MacKinnon.
With the stop motion animation of the robot being filmed at M&S over a 3-day weekend, Flix CG lead artist Simon Partington was on set accompanying the team the whole time ensuring the CG and stop motion animation all hooked up. Simon states, "the CG and Stop Motion animation had to be delivered simultaneously; there would be no time to fix things later so we were literally doing the CG renders and the animation at the same time. Seeing it come together shot by shot was fantastic!"
The final movie was shipped over to LA for completion including a soundtrack by acclaimed composer Danny Elfman. The Tim Burton retrospective is on at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 22th 2009 until April 26th 2010.
